While sitting in the waiting room of Ecole Québec Musique as my kids took their piano lessons, I was thumbing through some nature magazines when I came across a photo of a Chamois (a type of mountain goat). I wondered how some paleobiologist would reconstruct it millenia from now. Would (s)he give it leathery skin, like a reptile, or fur, or feathers and paint it blue and red with splashes of yellow?

I decided that I would like to try to transform this animal into something reptilian looking.

I was not terrible successful. I wasn’t anywhere close to creating something passable as a flight of fancy. Clearly I need a lot my practice with using GIMP.

Basically I ran into two problems. The first and major one was finding some sort of reptile skin pattern to use. I couldn’t find samples big enough and if I tried tiling the little ones I had, there was noticeable pattern repitition. The second problem was getting the texture to flow naturally over the skin, rather than looking like a flat surface applied on top of the image.

However, not all was lost, I did make this image I am rather fond of (and, yes, in my quest to make reptilian skin, I even tried using a brick pattern).

The original photo is here.

Finally finished the poster board for my son. So, unless I come up with something else before the end of the day, this is my thing for today.

Many other pictures didn’t make it to the board and have instead been put into a 8-1/2 x 11 portfolio album.

Bought the poster board at my favourite art supply store which puts them in these amazingly huge plastic bags. I think they even have a larger bag.

That’s my son (age 7) peeking out over the top.